Wednesday, 15 November 2017

SongKong 4.13 - High Definition Release

Today we release a new version of SongKong and SongKong for Melco. As well as some bug fixes this release has some improvements particularly for customers that have High Definition (or HD) version of their favourite albums.

Add High Definition to Album Title

Sites such as HDTracks and Quobuz now provide many releases in 24bit format, this is better than the 16bit standard CD quality and is known as high definition (or HD). To really see a difference the record company needs to have created this version from a higher quality original source and you need a decent sound system , but if both these conditions hold the result can be stunning.

The new Add [HD] to album title for High Definition Album option does that, it adds [HD] to the album title when your songs are encoded in a lossless format at 24bits or higher.

This option is enabled by default for Pro/Melco and Commercial customers. It means that if you have HD and non HD versions of the same album that you can clearly distinguish between the two when browsing via album. It also means that if you use SongKong to rename your songs using the standard folder = album organisation that it will be clear when browsing your music by folder.

New IS_HD Metadata field

We also now set a new IS_HD metadata field to 1 when your song is encoded as HD. You can then use this field to organize your music in other ways, such as a top level HD and non-HD folders. You could also configure MinimServer to browser music this way, we already have a guide showing how to use boolean fields in MinimServer.

New Audio Fields can be used in Rename Masks

We also have added audiosuffix, audiobitspersample fields, adding them to the existing audiobitrate, audiosamplerate, audioencoder and audioformat. All these fields take their value from your actual recording rather than metadata.

Only use Main Artist in the Album Artist field Option

We have also extended the featured track artists logic to album artists. Some releases are credited to a main artist and a collaborator, if you only want to see the main artist then simply set When album contains featured Album Artists to Only Use main artist in the album artist field and discard other artists

We have some other improvements and fixes as well, to see the full list head over to the News page